


The Luthor Interview

by twriting



Series: Action! Starring Lois Lane (With Special Guest Appearances By The Woman Of Steel) [2]
Category: Superman - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Age Changes, Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Female Clark Kent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-24
Updated: 2020-02-24
Packaged: 2021-02-22 11:34:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22882381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twriting/pseuds/twriting
Summary: It's taken a year of persistent effort (some might call it stalking) but Lois Lane has finally managed to get Cantrell Kent to agree to an interview about her high school friend Lex Luthor.
Relationships: Clark Kent & Lois Lane
Series: Action! Starring Lois Lane (With Special Guest Appearances By The Woman Of Steel) [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1644715
Kudos: 15





	The Luthor Interview

June 2021

"So, Kent." Lois Lane drapes her arm across Cantrell Kent's shoulders, which is a bit of a stretch because the kid is three or four inches taller than her and likes to wear boots. Her shoulders are pretty impressive too. Still, Lois feels it's important to establish dominance early in the interview process. "Bruce Wayne. What's he really like with the suit off?"

Trying to lean away from Lois, Kent turns a bit pink. "I just did a whole series of interviews with Cat Grant about Bruce. Why don't you read those?"

 _Oh kid, Bruce is definitely under your skin_. Grant's too good of a gossipmonger not to have noticed, but her published article about Kent is a friendly puff piece with a carefully edited interview that makes Kent sound like Wayne's loopy little sister. By amazing coincidence, just this morning Cat received an invitation to the opening gala of KIDStropolis's Gotham office. Bruce Wayne is an old-school Gothamite and he knows how to pay his debts.

"I always prefer to get my answers from the source," Lois tells Kent. "But don't worry, I promise not to tell anyone about you and Luthor necking behind the bleachers."

Kent stops trying to pull away from her. Her face bends into an expression blending confusion with a bit of distaste. "What has Chloe been saying now? That's just weird."

"Nah, I made that up." Lois's cousin Chloe Sullivan had the good luck to go to high school with an unhinged genius. After said genius's hinges well and truly broke, Sullivan threw her personal journals into a blender with a few articles she'd written with for the Smallville Sentinel, tossed the mush into a microwave with a couple of interviews with mutual friends, and served up You're All Just Jealous Of My Death Ray. Eight months later it has fallen down to number sixteen on the bestsellers list and Sullivan is still making money. Ben Affleck is rumoured to be in talks to direct a documentary based on her book.

Lois wishes Sullivan all the best with that. There's no way it can be worse than the trainwreck _Smallville_ streaming miniseries from last year.

"I really don't care about your love life," Lois assures the kid. "I've got other stuff to ask you about."

"I bet." Kent sounds tense. Well, no surprise there. She clearly doesn't like having the spotlight on her.

Some interviews can be done in relaxed settings, in coffee shops or parks, where the subject feels at ease. This one involves stolen military vehicles and nuclear hijacking, and they're in one of the Planet's unused offices right now. Blinds closed and old fluorescent lights not yet replaced by LEDs, it's a grim setting. The office has been half-assedly converted to an interview room by replacing the desks with a low table and some old chairs. Lois hopes this isn't too much like the sort of rooms Kent has been interrogated in before. The little vase of dried-up flowers on the table probably doesn't look like something from a government office. The camera and sound gear set up to record the interview is probably familiar.

Subject off-balance, Lois decides it's time to give Kent a bit of space. Tension and relaxation. She pulls her arm off the kid's shoulder and gestures at the thermos and mugs on the low table. "I made coffee earlier. Want any?"

"Thank you, but not right now." Kent and Lois sit across from one another. "I've got a little indigestion."

According to Olsen his girlfriend Cantrell has a serious caffeine addiction. For her to turn down a free hit, her stomach must be eating a hole in itself. Lois squashes down the first hints of sympathy. News knows no mercy.

"Don't you normally handle global affairs?" Kent scowls at the camera, then tries to smooth out her expression. "This sort of interview seems a little outside your normal beat."

"I hate to break it to you, but someone stealing a nuclear weapon counts as international news."

"I guess that - "

"So does hiking the Appalachian Trail with Bruce Wayne."

Kent actually suppresses a laugh. It comes out as a bit of a snort. "For the record, Bruce hates the outdoors. I actually feel bad for dragging him out there. You should have seen what he wanted to bring for a day hike."

"So that picture... "

"Just like I told Cat Grant. He really did have a bug smooshed in his hair. It was a little gross."

For her interview Kent wears a charcoal-grey long-sleeved blouse with a ruffled v-neck, and a black A-line skirt with grey boots. A long strand of dark wooden beads wrapped around her neck hangs just above her bustline. Kent is dressed to minimize her figure and blend into the background. Why someone who doesn't want to draw attention to herself spends as much time as she obviously does working out is an interesting question. Body image problems maybe. But it's not what Lois is here for.

Pure curiousity forces Lois to ask how much time Kent spends in the gym, because under those flowing sleeves the girl has serious definition and _wow_ shoulders.

"The gym? Not a lot of time, really. Few hours of cardio a week. I have freeweights in my dorm room." Kent's accent is stuck somewhere between Keystone and Baltimore.

"How much time do you spend bra shopping?"

Kent focuses a look of outraged humour, or maybe humourous outrage, on Lois. Either way Lois is clearly being humoured. "Is this part of the interview or are you hitting on me?"

"Just curious." And trying to keep Kent off balance without driving her back to her earlier defensive mood. Lois admits she's not the best interviewer at the Planet. Weirdly, that would actually be Lombard. Despite being a huge jackass the man is very good at being friendly and disarming when he needs to be. Lois is never disarmed in any situation. But she's a good enough interviewer not to leap right into the big questions. Having loosened Kent up a bit she starts with some general inquiries about how the kid finds the differences between Smallville and Metropolis, what does she miss about the place, how did she adjust when she first moved from Kansas.

The defensiveness comes back. Kent's replies are terse, vague. The big city takes some getting used to. She misses her friends. Kansas was a long time ago. Following up with a question about Lana Lang (According to Sullivan voted 'Most Likely To Kill Her Girlfriend In Her Sleep' by the yearbook committee, which was watered down to 'Ginger Yandere' after a warning from the school administrators), Lois watches Kent's body language. Closed in and uncomfortable, loosening up when she talks about Lana. Lois follows up with questions about where she and Lana used to hang out, another one about Pete Ross (Studying civil engineering, plans to return to Smallville). After Kent answers Lois trades her a story about Chloe Sullivan, the time Sullivan came to Metropolis and managed to lose every piece of luggage she was travelling with. Including her handbag with painkillers and pads.

"That sounds like Chloe. Prepared for anything, and then everything goes wrong. She had the worse luck."

"I don't know," Lois says. "Going to school with Luthor and his friends did a lot to kickstart her career."

Cantrell grimaces. "Yeah. Lucky us. Well, I guess we might as well get this over with."

* * *

* * *

_The conversation that follows has been edited for length and clarity._

**Following up on that, it doesn't sound like you agree with some of the rumours about the Luthor family.**

"Yeah, lots of people want to speculate about how awful they [Arlene and Jules Luthor] must have been. It's a nice easy answer for what went wrong. I think they were just the wrong parents for Lex and his older sister. They were great with Lena. But they just didn't know how to deal with genius, with unconventional people, and two out of their three kids were unconventional geniuses. People want the Luthors to be bad, you know, abusive parents who raised a dangerous kid. But they just didn't understand Lex, and they kept trying to treat him like he was ordinary. And when it didn't work with him, they tried harder. And, well, that turned out to be the wrong approach."

**Lex Luthor has often been described as angry, not always at anything in specific. Do you consider that accurate?**

"Not at first. He was pretty sure of himself, and he really didn't deal well with authority figures, but some of the guys on the football team were worse. He got angry later, but. Well I don't know. The way his so-called partners treated him, I think he had a right to be angry. Lex was the most gifted engineer on the planet, probably one of the smartest people in the world, and they basically stripmined him for technical work. He wasn't as business-smart as he liked to think, and the contract he signed was pretty exploitive. He barely made anything off the patents they commercialized. And there was lots of stuff in his home lab he worked on without corporate support. After the lab accident they just helped themselves to that too. Their contract didn't cover anything he worked on at home."

**Lex Luthor signed that contract shortly after he turned eighteen, with the supervision of his parents. Are you accusing his corporate partners of patent theft?**

"So Stagg Industries, their new driver-assist system is something Lex came up with when he was in grade nine. He did all the basic design work, then never bothered developing it any further. Merlyn Global, the maser they patented to sterilize surgical equipment, Lex made that to kill aphids on my mom's roses. It destroys mitochondria. When Lex tried to explain how it worked, Chloe [Sullivan] started calling it his death ray. But with the driver-assist system, the sterilizer ray, the ionic booster for chemical rockets, that's all stuff Lex developed before he signed the contract with those companies. The agreement was that they'd build him a lab to work in, and they'd have first shot at commercializing anything he developed there, but after the fire they just took everything he'd done. Said he was in breach of contract for creating dangerous conditions and destroying equipment. Lex was in the hospital being treated for chemical and radiation exposure, and they just came in and took everything. Some lawyers showed up at the hospital to tell Lex how it was going to be."

**Is that when your father was detained for punching one of them?**

"Yeah. I didn't even know he could get that mad. Chief Parker [Smallville Chief of Police Douglas Parker] told them they'd need police protection if they tried to press charges against Jonathan Kent."

**This was shortly before he vanished, right?**

"He disappeared about five weeks later. I was worried about him before, that he'd do something self-destructive. He'd been so quiet through the trial, and if you knew Lex at all one thing you know is that he's never quiet. But after the fire, when the companies that backed his lab pressed charges, he just got... Furious. Didn't say a word about how he felt but you could see it under his skin."

**You were worried he would hurt himself?**

"Yeah. That's another thing people don't realize about Lex. The only person he really ever wanted to hurt was himself, he just didn't really know how. When he lashed out at people, yelled at them or pulled one of his mean stunts on them, he was lashing out at what he saw as his own mistake in trusting them. He never really trusted anyone, even his friends, and especially not himself. After the fire he blamed himself for trusting a bunch of corporate assassins, and I thought he was going to lash out again. But then he got quiet, and I figured maybe he'd finally figured out how to hurt himself."

**He escaped the day before sentencing.**

"Blew a hole right through the wall of the detention centre. People talk about making explosives out of common household chemicals but Lex is the only person on Earth to weaponize ink and chewing gum. I guess he had a couple of other things mixed in there too, but that's all classified now. Everything I can say about what Lex did after is classified too, except the truth. I don't know what he wanted that nuclear warhead for, and I hope I never find out. I don't know where it is, and I don't know where he is. All I can say is, it's like Lex vanished off the face of the Earth."


End file.
